All posts by Cari Vos

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About Cari Vos

Cari is an Instructional Technology Consultant with FITS. She received her B.A in Psychology and Linguistics from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI and came to DePaul in 2015 for her M.A. in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse. She started her tenure at FITS as a graduate assistant, but quickly became enamored with Instructional Technology and recently joined as full-time staff. When she's not on campus, she enjoys traveling, baking, and spoiling her niece and nephew.

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An OLA’s Guide to Class Engagement Over Zoom

Foreword

Today’s blog post is brought to you by representatives from our team of Online Learning Ambassadors (OLAs). In 2020, like countless other institutions, DePaul University moved classes online in response to the growing COVID-19 pandemic. To help instructors unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the transition to Zoom, the Center for Teaching and Learning created a new team of student employees designed to help support students and instructors. Although we’ve returned to campus now, some of the new online modalities remain, so the need and appreciation for the OLAs remains as well.
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Using Genre in the Classroom

During the holidays, I spend the majority of the time with my partner’s family, who are predominantly first- and second-generation Polish immigrants. Many of them can speak Polish to each other with ease. Now, I’ve tried a few times to learn Polish so I can participate in conversations (or at least have a marginal understanding of what they are talking about). Really, I can only name a few foods and I can sing Happy Birthday.

But sitting around the table, not being able to speak or understand the Polish they’re speaking, often leaves me feeling isolated and confused. Those moments remind me just how challenging it can be to try and be an active participant in the room, when I fundamentally don’t communicate in the same way.

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Becoming an a11y: Inclusive Design in the Classroom

For years, the staff in my office have been talking about and writing about a platform of accessibility and concepts of Universal Design. Erin largely talked about a movement within accessibility called the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework. UDL focuses designing and ensuring that spaces —physical or digital— can be used by virtually anyone. Joe, built upon this idea by explaining the three pronged approach that UDL uses:

  1. Provide multiple means of engagement
  2. Provide multiple means of representation
  3. Provide multiple means of action and expression

Dee introduced some basic ways that we can implement these principles directly into our courses. However, while I was at D2L’s annual conference a couple weeks ago, I realized that we’ve done a pretty good job explaining what accessibility is, but we’ve never interrogated why it matters. Continue reading →

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Excelling Efficiently

Excel logoWhile I don’t love the phrase, “work smarter, not harder” (there’s a great article here on why), I think that too often we find ourselves doing tasks that we can do more efficiently. My colleagues have shared their tips for working efficiently already, such as using tabs to batch task repetitive work, using text expanders to save time, and even I’ve written variations of this idea with my post on using mail merge to quickly create data-driven documents. This time around, I’m returning to my finicky, temperamental, and all-too-powerful favorite tool: Microsoft Excel.

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Tried and True Technologies, Part 2: Google

In August, I posted the first of this “Tried and True Technologies” series. That post focused on how you can use mail merging in Word to make life a little easier. This time around, I figured we should just go for a big one: Google.

Google has a ton of apps—not just Mail, Docs, and Sheets either. They have a full repertoire of tools, called the “G Suite.” From this suite, there are few tools that I love and find incredibly easy to use. In this post, I’ll cover a tool I find to be underused: Google Keep.

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Tried and True Technologies, Part 1: Microsoft

In my college English 101 course I was assigned to write a persuasive essay. Initially, I wanted to write a paper about the purpose of technology. I started doing research, but couldn’t find anything helpful. So I abandoned that and picked a different topic. Lately, I’ve been thinking again about it. In my role here at FITS, I try to find ways to make technology help our office do tasks smarter, faster, and more efficiently. These tasks often take me back to tried-and-true technologies from Microsoft.

One of my projects lately has been working with the Global Learning Experience team, preparing for the upcoming Global Learning Conference in October. This was my first time being on the development side of a conference; let me be the first to say that it is no easy task. My role was specifically on the technology end.

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What Does Your Home Screen Say About What You Value ?

iPhone Home ScreenI’ve always been research-oriented, and I’d like to believe that I’m a curious soul. I love asking questions, often with little hope of finding a definitive answer. One thing I’ve always wondered is how we think about the things we hold important. It started with what apps I keep on my phone’s home screen. I was looking at the difference between the home screen on my phone versus the home screen on my boyfriend’s phone. He had folders on the front; I put folders on the other pages. I kept a lot of the “pre-installed” apps on my home screen; he just had one or two.

So I started to think about what my home screen might say about what I value and what I use a lot. In this search, I noticed quite a bit about myself:

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What I Learned in Autumn Term

When I started to think what I could write about for this blog post, all I could think about was what I could possibly add to the conversation. What perspective do I have that others may not? What insights could I offer? And I began to consider the insanity of this last term. Over the past 11 weeks, I had three roles: I was a student, an instructor, and a staff member. If you had asked me during week 7 how things were going, this is probably what my response would be like:

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